barack obama -- presidency by barack obama. barack obama and the rise of a new kind, a new, more ambitious and i might even say radical kind of american liberalism. regarding the '80s, i think the one column that sort of captures it the best is the one in which bill clinton says during his presidency when we look back on that era -- he meant the cold war era -- and and we long for a, i made a crack the other day. i said, gosh, i miss the cold war. it was a joke. i mean, i didn't want really miss it, but you get the joke. and the point was that we had this myth created after conservativism in the decade over the '80s, utterly destroyed and undid what was left of the soviet empire of commune ill. this myth -- communism. this myth that there was a great national consensus on how to confront the soviets. now, there was in the '50s and the '60s, but it dissolved after the vietnam era. and there was a great division in the country. and the '80s were distinguished by the fact that there was a total breakdown of that consensus. and i w